The White House is trying to calm a furor following a Wall Street Journal report that said Trump wrote a bawdy birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein.

Those factors, applied to the Epstein saga, appear muddled at best. Trump has called for “pertinent” grand jury records to come out. And one of the arguments DOJ previously made against disclosures was that it could damage the purported victims of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking conspiracy, many of whom are still alive.